Xiānglián rùnsè 香奩潤色
Polishing the Perfume Box [a Cosmetic and Female-Health Manual] edited by 胡文煥 Hú Wénhuàn (fl. Wànlì, Hángzhōu publisher).
About the work
A one-juan cosmetic, female-hygienic, and gynecological-health manual: the rare late-Míng survival of an entire compilation explicitly for women’s adornment and health (jiārén 佳人, “the beautiful woman”, being the addressee), running through hair-care (with separately marked subsections for eyebrows), skin and complexion treatments, cosmetic powders, perfume-and-incense receipts, gynecological complaints (menstrual regulation, tāichǎn 胎產 management — pregnancy and parturition), and household storage and laundry methods. Hú’s editorial framework deliberately separates cosmetic adornment (where one yìnshì 玉成 a person, in his xù’s metaphor — like a craftsman polishing jade) from therapeutic and reproductive care, treating the former as decorative and the latter as essential (zhìyào 至要).
Prefaces
The transmitted xù is by 胡文煥 Hú Wénhuàn himself. He opens with a paradox: “Heaven gives birth to a beautiful woman, snow-skinned and flower-faced, jade-boned and ice-fleshed — as in the cases of 西施 Xīshī, 楊貴妃 Yáng Guīfēi — who needs only to lightly sweep her eyebrows and is of herself stirringly attractive; how should rouge and powder defile her true [beauty]? Then is rùnsè unneeded? — But: even a good craftsman requires sharp tools to do his work well; painting requires the five colours before its blankness is brilliant. Therefore: the beautiful woman’s repair of her own toilet, the polishing of her clothes, is like a flower receiving the dew, or jade being polished — her bright fineness is thereby further increased; therefore rùnsè is also necessarily borrowed. And as the world is not entirely of Xīshī and Yáng Guīfēi, this is what I have gathered, no more than a help to the perfume-box. — Moreover, in this collection, to cure her illnesses, to identify her wonders, to regulate her menses, to settle her pregnancies — these are the surely-essential items. And the storage and washing methods, though peripheral matters, are also indispensable to the jiārén; their methods are fully recorded. Indeed, the way of preservation-and-regulation is to be seen here too — only the powder-and-eyebrow gentlemen can analyse it. If I should offer this rouge-and-powder to a jiārén, she will surely say: xìng kǒng, xìng kǒng 幸孔幸孔 (“how lucky, how lucky”!) — the good craftsman’s sharp tools, the painter’s five colours, what else need one envy?”
Abstract
The Xiānglián rùnsè is one of the rarest of the Hú Wénhuàn corpus — a complete late-Míng compendium of women-directed practical knowledge in a single fascicle, integrating cosmetic, hygienic, and gynecological-health prescriptions. The first section (Tóufà bù, with附眉) opens with: “Women’s temples without disorder, like a mirror with light”: a recipe of lùjiǎo cài (dried Hizikia seaweed), five qián, soaked in boiling water for an hour, cooled to a paste, used to brush the temples. A “hair-not-falling-out” recipe: thumb-sized strips of cèbǎi arborvitae (two), three fěi-nuts, two walnut-kernels, ground fine and rubbed into the scalp. A “hair-growth” recipe: qínjiāo, báizhǐ, chuānxiōng (one liǎng each), mànjīngzǐ, línglíngxiāng, fùzǐ (five qián each), shredded and steeped in clear sesame oil for 21 days; the resulting oil to be rubbed into bald spots three times a day, taking great care not to drip on bare flesh.
The work belongs to a small subgenre of late-Míng publications on women’s cosmetic and health practice — the most famous being 呂坤 Lǚ Kūn’s 閨範 Guī fàn (1590) for ethical instruction, but with the Xiānglián rùnsè uniquely focused on practical-cosmetic application. Its parallel within the same Hú Wénhuàn corpus is the 拔翹書 Bāqiào shū (= Bāqiào shū of cosmetic refinement), and within the larger Wànlì publishing economy the 寶本堂運見法 Bāoběntáng yùnjiǎn fǎ (cosmetic and hygienic). The jicheng.tw-reprint preservation of the complete fascicle is one of the more substantial pieces of evidence on late-Míng female-directed practical-knowledge publication.
The date bracket 1590–1602 reflects Hú’s publishing window. The dynasty is unambiguously Ming.
Translations and research
- Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley: UC Press, 1999) — for the medical-gynecological context.
- Yi-Li Wu, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, 2010).
- Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford, 1997) — for the longue durée of women’s-directed practical knowledge publication.
- Ann Waltner, “Recent Scholarship on Chinese Women”, Signs 22.2 (1996), 410–428.
- Zhōng-guó yī-jí dà-cí-diǎn, s.v. 香奩潤色.
Other points of interest
The xù’s rhetorical strategy — paradoxically opening with the claim that true beauty needs no adornment, then proceeding to justify the entire content of the volume — is one of the small but very expressive moments of late-Míng publishing self-consciousness, in which the editor must simultaneously address his (largely male, literati) book-buying readership and the (largely female) end-users of the prescriptions.